(Chapter the Twenty-Second, concluded)
When we were in the junk shack (not the shambolic shack, the one nearer to town – much like brass keys, there are a lot of shacks to keep track of!) we saw a sort of shadow of Peter across a barrier, and thought we’d be able to hear something if there was some kind of sound going, so that’s where we’re headed now.
Because I am impatient, I ring the chime on the way:
>ring chime
You flick the chime gently with a fingernail. Nothing seems to happen at first, then the chime begins to produce a gentle thrum seeming to emanate from deep inside its core. Over the next few moments, the hum increases in intensity until the chime is softly buzzing in your hand. It seems to give no indication of stopping any time soon.
Our trip is punctuated by what sounds like an unpleasantly cacophanous soundscape:
The chime is definitely growing louder.
The chime suddenly shudders more violently in your hand.
The vibration of the chime is slightly stronger now.
The ringing of the chime redoubles.
You think the chime’s tone is slightly louder.
None of these indicate it’s ever getting softer, mind, until:
>in
Inside the Shack (Daniel Ravipinto)
The shadows pool in strange shapes along the earthen floor of the shack, the only light coming from the cracks in the surprisingly high ceiling and through the opened door. Piles of accumulated junk that Peter’s family must have stored here over the decades lie against the inner walls, which have turned grey with either dust or the mere passage of time.
One of the shadows at the shack’s far end moves, then separates into a distinct shape, slumped against a supporting pillar. There’s something in here with you.
The chime’s ringing reaches a crescendo, then somehow impossibly rings louder. The alien tone becomes more shrill, sending the bones of your skull thrumming with a sympathetic vibration. Just when you think your head will split in two, you realize that all you can hear is your own breathing. Somehow, the chime has stopped.
Huh – can we hear anything new now?
>listen
The silence you hear sounds unnatural, as though a tone were missing that ought to be present.
Peter fruitlessly tries to wipe the blood from his shirt and hands.
Okay, guess we need to start it again:
>ring chime
Nothing happens. You try again. Still nothing.
The third time the chime bellows in response, a deep, aching tone like a brazen bell the size of the manor itself. And then, silence. And yet the tone goes on - for you can feel it in the bones of your hand, your chest. And then
the chime is falling from your nerveless fingers as your hands clamp to your ears. For the ringing must still be going on, but your ears…
Your hands come away, covered in blood and the grey walls of the shack slide to one side and you see Peter, on his feet, tears running down his face, screaming silently at you as he slams his fists against the strange barrier again and again and then it shatters and him along with it.
A thousand shards of Peter are floating in the air, rotating slowly in the light and then they each slowly align, each a tiny dagger pointed at your face and then they fly…
[Press any key to continue…]
The Prism
A cramped and claustrophic darkness sketching out a triangular space of a few square feet. There must be light of some kind, because you can see, but for the life of you, you couldn’t say where or what it’s coming from. The walls are the same solid air you saw in the shack, but without the sigils you saw under the surface. Outside is only darkness.
Somehow, again, trapped in the same, small space, is Peter, lying slumped against the far wall.
Umm, I’m not sure I like where we’ve wound up, but we’ve found Peter, ahead of schedule! Maybe we won’t need to do that whole book ritual thing after all.
>x peter
Peter’s eyes roll upwards until they’re pointed in your direction. He blinks exhaustedly. He’s dressed in the same grey shift you find yourself wearing. He blinks again, as if uncertain what he’s seeing, then he starts backwards as if surprised. Then he climbs to his knees and smiles.
“Darling?” he asks, passing his hand over his face in disbelief. “Is that you?”
He stands and takes a single step closer to you and somehow whatever is allowing you to see here brightens. Now it is you who is blinking.
His face is wrong.
This isn’t Peter. You don’t know how you know but you know. There’s something in his eyes, in the planes of his face.
“What?” the thing that is not your husband says, his mouth moving just a millimeter too much, his eyes half-closed, hiding something horrible behind the lids. “What is it?” he asks, with an awful wonder in his voice that turns your stomach. This is not Peter. This is Not-Peter.
Not-Peter approaches you slowly, frowning. He walks the length of the prism, back and forth, his eyes never leaving yours. Then he stops dead. “You’re not her, are you? You’re…who are you?”
Either we’ve suddenly come down with Capgras Syndrome, or something is deeply deeply weird here – or heck, possibly both!
(I know about Capgras Syndrome because of Richard Powers’ novel The Echo Maker, by the way – definitely recommend it)
>x me
What you were wearing and everything you carried are gone. You’re been left clothed in a coarse grey shift, barely enough for modesty.
Not-Peter shudders. “What are you?”
As even Our-Peter would now, that’s a complex question when it comes to Nitocris.
>ask not-peter about himsefl
Not-Peter suddenly turns to you, clearly angry. “What have you done with her!” he shouts. “What have you done with Naomi?”
In fairness, fumbling the simple word “himself” is just the sort of thing a body-snatching alien would do.
>ask not-peter about himself
The non-light in the darkness beyond the wall flares and beyond it you can now see – another prism. Another space defined by three walls, one of which is the wall of your own cell. And in that space – another you, another Naomi, dressed in a grey shift. And with her, another Peter.
Not-Peter spins and stares at the pair, then looks back at you. “Is she the real…”
Oh, wait – there were all those shards before we wound up here…
There’s another flare and the light expands. Now there are two other prisms.
>x prisms
There are four - two of Peter, two of you. The newest two can seem to see the older two. They’re pounding on the prism walls to no avail.
There’s another flare of non-light on either side of the prism. The number of others jumps to eight.
Your eyes randomly focus on one of the other chambers. Peter smiles. Then he splits into a million shimmering shards.
>x peter
Not-Peter cannot take his eyes off the other cells. His face is pressed against the wall, his eyes flickering constantly from face to face.
The thing illuminating this space breathes outward. Doubling, doubling again – so sixty-four copies?
You glance over. Peter and Naomi are both dead, lying in each other’s arms. There are no marks upon them.
Wait, which Peter? Which Naomi?
More non-light, more people … hundreds…
You look to your left. Peter and Naomi are calmly drinking tea. At least you think it’s tea. Now Peter is eating his cup.
Hey, randomly trying to eat inappropriate objects is a Nitocris thing, not a Peter thing (unless maybe that’s what brought them together in the first place?)
Oh god. You somehow now know that there are exactly 1,227 copies around you. But you don’t know which of you or Peter is missing a copy.
At the edge of your newfound vision, you see another chamber. Peter is laughing. He can’t stop laughing. He is gasping for breath, and his lips are turning blue. But the laughter still comes.
Are they all dying, or going mad?
And now the non-light expands outwards - up and down and you are at the center of a matrix extending infinitely in all directions and all there are are walls and Naomis and Peters. For ever and ever, amen.
Faced with the infinite, Not-Peter manages to pull himself away from the prism wall. He turns on you, tears in his eyes. “Which one? Which one is us? The real us?”
…that question seems like a category error.
say me
(to Not-Peter)
Not-Peter drops to his knees and begins to sob. “I can’t take it anymore. I can’t. I’ve just – there’s nothing here. Nothing real.”
As he continues to sob, you notice a strange shimmering along the back of his hands.
>x shimmering
A strange helix of multicolored strings are attached to Not-Peter at various points - his hands, his elbows, his head. They vanish into the infinite madness of copies above you.
The shimmering flares like the non-light and now there are more of them - more threads, pulling upwards towards the ceiling…
Oh god. There’s something in the ceiling.
We’re not going to like this, are we?
>x ceiling
There is a thing. In the prism. In the ceiling. A spider thing. Eyes and legs and threads of rainbow. And all of them are attached to Not-Peter.
Not-Peter turns and the spider-thing turns and he opens his mouth and it opens its mouth and oh god its speaking and and crying in time with him because they’re the same thing and god please let none of this be real nothing will ever be real again –
And now you feel a tugging and you raise your hand and see the thread on your own hand and it pulls and it prods and its eyes are looking into your eyes because they’re its eyes because you chose to move your hand and your eye and it’s not telling you you’re telling it and then you pull back and it pulls up and then it’s puppets all the way down…
[Press any key to continue…]
Now that is a creepy image.
An origami unfolding of your mind along an axis that you always knew was there but did not wish to see. A centipede with a million arms unfolding in all directions. Circles of patterns and routines. Sharp edges of improbability. Jagged lines of perverse action. Outright impossibilities cutting deep, defining a horizon.
And then a slowing and a flattening, and there you are, all of you – all you were and are and could be – laid out on the grey slab that is the rest of your non-reality. Pinned and flensed and categorized and autopsied before the great mass of eyes and twitching limbs above. And still the thread climbs and your sense of self climbs with it and then they both narrow and expand and soon you are not even you anymore…
[Press any key to continue…]The Vaadignephod-continuity was exceptionally clear as to what is to be allowed. The complete possibility space of the intersection of the Naomi-entity and the Peter-entity has been given over to the Weaver-continuity for purposes of experimentation and/or entertainment in exchange for support of material and/or energetic resources within the bound-domicile up to and including quasi-real multi-dimensional manifestations, as well as any necessary calculations performed within the given hypergeometric domain.
An equitable and standard enough exchange, like much of existence in the lower dimensions: limited, but full of possibility.
The initial state-machine, however, has revealed the full possibility space available utilizing only the entities’ immediate physical manifestations to be rather small. It seems there is, in fact, a hard and considerable limit to how much a continuity can achieve with such mere flesh before repetition sets in.
Hence the Book.
The Book of All Your Days
A metaphor, of course. But a useful one. Its pages are theoretically infinite and the permutations of each individual page an orthogonal, additionally endless axis. For reasons that are unclear, there are only three such pages here. (What has happened to the continuity? Where are the others? Who are you? Who am I? Who is asking this?)
Above the first of the Book’s pages float sigils in the Tongue which read WHEN WE WERE NOT YET. The others await a mere turning away.
A tableau of meeting is laid out across the Book’s scenery: a domicile of primitive education. Tiny entities scurry in the background from gathering to gathering, futilely attempting to expand their primitive minds. In the foreground is a momentous meeting between two entities as small as the others that crowd the scene. The Naomi-entity seems to be greeting the Peter-entity.
The Vaadignephod-continuity (no don’t think of it, don’t think its name, don’t say its…) utilizing a mere four of its myriad and infinite Aspects, had/has/will-have defined a complexly interesting manifold of hypergeometry – bounded by the Four Fundamental Movements of the Utter North, South, East and West – which defines the probability-space over which the Weaver-continuity was/has/will-be given dominion.
Laid across the top of the book’s opened page like a bookmark is a lovely message-thread of your own design.
Characteristically for this author (I mentioned he did Slouching Towards Bedlam, right?) this is a lot to take in – but it rather elegantly explains a lot of the strangeness we’ve encountered. There has been a dark bargain of some sort, it appears, that doesn’t involve just Peter and Nitocris – but also thousands, millions of different versions of them, variants whose differences are somehow creating the possibility-space for Vaadignephod to wreak its will.
We’ve got a lot of different takes on Peter in all the time we’ve been traveling, from hapless, beloved husband to squirrely co-conspirator with his family – and likewise, others keep mistaking Nitocris for someone she’s not, buying her inconsistent cover stories of being an insipid mortal named Naomi far more easily than you’d expect. Even the Manor itself has sometimes thought we’re a Cragne! We’d come up with various explanations to justify this, but the truth is simpler but more disturbing – in most versions of reality, Peter’s wife really is a perfectly normal woman. We – Nitocris, the ghoul-queen – are an extreme outlier, at the far end of the continuum of Naomis and pretend-Naomis. Perhaps because we already know some of the deeper cosmic truths and have gazed into the abyss, we’ve been able to keep more of our identity as we’ve navigated the chaotic mismash this nexus-event has made of Backwater.
For all that, I’m not sure we’re actually Nitocris right now…
>x me
A Weaver of Forms is a fine thing to be – as beauteous and graceful as one is delicate and fragile. Clever of limbs and eyes and mind so as to encompass a myriad of creative realities. Your fate as part of such a continuity is much to be desired.
>i
You carry the whole of possibility within your claws.
Yeah no we’re a pattern-spider.
>x bookmark
It links this manifold possibility space to those of the rest of the continuity (though why you cannot hear them even now is disturbing). Pulling at it signaled/signals/will signal the rest of the continuity that the book may be closed, for your work/play here is done.
>take it
Manipulating the thread in a manner it is not intended had/could have/will have…uncomfortable consequences.
Guess we can stop this whenever we want, but let’s play along for now.
>turn page
The Book does not, of course, turn its pages. They are a metaphor. Yet as a metaphor it does an admirable job, shifting along yet another axis, giving you access to yet another portion of probability.
Above the second of the Book’s pages float sigils in the Tongue which read WHEN WE BECAME. The others await a mere turning away.
A tableau of a primitive binding ritual is laid out across the Book’s scenery: a group of mortal entities gathered against a green background, surrounded by flora of all kinds. Are all of them necessary as a sacrifice? In the foreground stand those that must be bound. They are adolescent, younger than those that surround them. One of the entities is the Naomi-entity. The other is the Peter-entity.
Vaadignephod and/or the Cragnes continues to be really, really invested in our marriage (maybe we should have just eloped?)
>x naomi
That which exists within the book is possibility made manifest. Left in a given state, the entities and their environs define a singular spacetime slice that the rest of the Weaver-continuity may make use of, once they are alerted via the mechanism of the message-thread.
Right, from this perspective it’s all about the context multiple threads create – it doesn’t make sense to talk about any individual thing.
>turn page
Your tarsi ache with anticipation as the next probability-space slides into existence.
Above the third of the Book’s pages float sigils in the Tongue which read WHEN WE WERE NO LONGER. The others await a mere turning away.
A tableau of some sort of parting ritual is laid out across the Book’s scenery: a repository for the storage and repair of mortal entities. In the foreground stand those are to be parted. They are adolescent, barely sentient. The Naomi-entity is beginning the ritual.
The ritual we’re contemplating would unite us, rather than part us – but as occupants of an outlier-reality, the state-superposition this book-metaphor is showing us may not pertain to our subjective experience.
>pull bookmark
As your claws close along the thread in anticipation of your work’s end, a shiver runs along your tarsis’ beauteous length. There is something wrong here on a true and fundamental level. There is some form of corruption spreading through the continuity’s probability-network. This must be stopped. Immediately. Or aesthetically unpleasing results may occur.
You thrust yourself into the threads both here and else where/when. This cannot continue. Something must have fallen in from the Prisms, from somewhere in the lower dimensions. And then something snaps and…
Oh god, were you just a spider…?
And then you’re falling again and the universe folds itself flat…
[Press any key to continue…]
Ha, something’s disturbing the pattern-weavers’ plans. I think it might be us!
You press a key and the next wall of text scrolls to the top of the screen. Dear god, but this part’s overblown, isn’t it? And was there really any point to all the combinatorial complexity? Any really difference between the various states? It had some interesting language, you suppose, but the sheer amount of work that went into it didn’t really amount to much, did it?
Obfuscation’s not the same thing as depth, you think, pressing another key. Oh well, perhaps the next room will be more interesting…
Ha, of course things were going to get meta.
[Press any key to continue…]And the threads continue, outward again, encompassing the shiny black beetle-creatures who are humanity’s inheritors and the strange conical beings who are in turn possessed by a different alien intelligence to the polyps and shoggoths who would eventually devour them all. And so the universe collapses along endless strings connecting puppets who think they are puppeteers whose puppeteers are puppets of puppets. All dancing to the same cacophonous tune. All of their strings pulled to a center where the threads roil in a blind, idiot flailing that calls itself…
Oh.
Oh.
It seems the abyss is looking back.
WE ARE COMING. AND WE ARE LEGION.
And there’s a nice Shadow Out of Time linkage, though of course the narrative conceit here is substantially more pomo than anything in Lovecraft.
[Press any key to continue…]WE ARE LEGION.
WE ARE.
WE.
I.
I am.
I am…?
You.
You are.
You are lying in the middle of the shack and your head hurts and your back aches and… Why? There was…what. A figure? There was someone here. There was definitely someone here.
Wasn’t there?
(snipping for length)